Poetry

That morning there was no sun, only a powder of strong light as if two suns were shining. We awoke in an armistice of colors, colors hiding in the depths of themselves, their white Sunday clothes. Came noon, the bearer of fruits that assuage no hunger. In the testicles, joy: the sign that somewhere the…

(“If Innocent” is from The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty, a book-length collection of monologues spoken by Dr. Matthew Mighty-grain-o-salt Dante O’Connor, the character in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood. O’Connor is an American Irishman from San Francisco, a flamboyantly homosexual, unlicensed gynecologist, and a non-stop raconteur. In “If Innocent” he recalls (for Ignace, his…

A pink motel hovers over the river, Shangri-la where local athletes purchase local women in the lounge . . . Is this where I grew up? I paddle in my Oldtown canoe, looking for relics of riverbank that pre-date highway and turnpike. Blackberries ripen by the black water, a snapping turtle suns on a rock,…

In advance, much deconstruction and rebuilding. You guess what each part must do at a crucial moment then memorize the whole. If every click is not dreamlike you take it down again. Much bathing of stars and rings and springs in clear solvents. Letters with numbered codes and curious names go out at night to…

In the dream I carry inside me, which is no dream, I am always the child between them. A family sits down to supper, the yellow kitchen yellow with light. Father sits here, and Mother sits here, and this chair in the middle is mine. Someone argues or complains. Or maybe there is only the…

In our house it’s still dark, the shapes of furniture indistinct, but my attention drifts out the window, I’m vaguely happy keeping vigil at the stove. One moment the sun is shining, the next a wet snow saturates the hills. Dark clouds set the pack of dogs barking, the cows start their slow ride to…

That night was nothing we knew. We’d never seen such stars, not even there, in Texas. My mother held the sky maps and leaned so far back she fell. She wasn’t hurt. Nothing can hurt her, I thought, who didn’t know, and aimed my flashlight at the night, and shot. A long way from here…

A few humbling things. Outside my real house there’s an actual picket fence, a flowerbox, one shady maple, and a lawn too big to mow. I said I’d never come to this. I said a lot of things. And sulked, tempestuous, as seasons passed, unworthy of fierce attention. My greatest fear: fathers grew fat and…

* Is it for me to call her by her name, she at whose command the air is blessed tonight and the roads lie without the slightest ounce of perturbation Ezi di mma? Or is it for me to hold back from all such mention of her name and let what is sheltered rest as…